No hope for the Irrelevance Claim

Egler, Miguel

doi:10.1007/s11098-019-01373-2

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 29 publications

(22 reference statements)

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“…This line of argument, while having gained significant attention, has proven unpopular among other metaphilosophers (see Horvath, 2022 for a recent overview). To pick just a few lines of criticism, text-based denial of intuitions has been criticized for misidentifying the sorts of mental states intuitions are (Weinberg, 2014), for failing to explain the historical details of epistemology after Gettier (Brown, 2017), for failing to appreciate that stated evidence does not equate actual evidence (Egler, 2020), and for entailing skepticism about philosophy's ability to evaluate texts (Landes, 2020). However, while much has been said criticizing the conclusion that intuitions do not play a role in philosophy, the methodological choice to argue from wording of original texts has not been examined.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

Landes

2022

Philos Stud

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In recent years, two competing methodological frameworks have developed in the study of the epistemology of philosophy. The traditional camp, led by experimental philosophy and its allies, has made inferences about the epistemology of philosophy based on the reactions, or intuitions, people have to works of philosophy. In contrast, multiple authors have followed the lead of Deutsch and Cappelen by setting aside experimental data in favor of inferences based on careful examination of the text of notable works of philosophy. In other words, the debate is split between authors focusing on philosophy’s consumption and those focusing on philosophy’s production. This paper examines the motivation for focusing on original texts and other evidence of philosophy’s production and finds it lacking. Drawing upon Hills’ distinction between propagation and transmission, I argue that the social epistemology of philosophy does not justify the recent focus on original texts of philosophy. Because the philosophical knowledge of consumers of philosophy is likely inspired by producers of philosophy, as opposed to epistemically grounded in the producers’ epistemic states, experimental philosophy had it right all along—if we want to know the epistemic standing of philosophy, we need to look to philosophy’s consumers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

Landes

2022

Philos Stud

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“…I will present the way in which this epistemological thesis can be read in Deutsch and Cappelen and the ways in which as a metaphilosophical orientation, it marks a break from the epistemology of philosophy as traditionally conceived. 2 The description comes from Egler (2020) and Nado (2016). out of McDowell and Fricker's reading of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…But it is argument that plays the crucial role in the context of justification. But this is deeply problematic since it opens the possibility that the only reason philosophers are investing a great deal of energy in defending a particular claim in the context of justification arises from contingent features of their cultural background or environmental context at work in the context of discovery (Nado, 2016, see also Egler, 2020). If so, the worries negative experimental philosophers have been drawing attention to (for summary of the worries, see Machery, 2017) have not disappeared but reasserted itself in the context of justification.…”

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confidence: 99%

The epistemology of thought experiments without exceptionalist ingredients

Irikefe

2022

Synthese

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This paper argues for two interrelated claims. The first is that the most innovative contribution of Timothy Williamson, Herman Cappelen, and Max Deutsch (a.k.a., the intuition deniers) in the debate about the epistemology of thought experiments is not the denial of intuition and the claim of the irrelevance of experimental philosophy but the claim of epistemological continuity and the rejection of philosophical exceptionalism. The second is that a better way of implementing the claim of epistemological continuity is not Deutsch and Cappelen’s argument view or Williamson’s folk psychological view (i.e., off-line simulation). This is so because while the argument view makes the basis of the relevant classificational judgement evidentially too demanding; the folk psychological view makes it too weak and error-prone to count as an adequate explanation. Drawing from a certain reading of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics that flowers in Miranda Fricker and John McDowell, I argue for the reason-responsiveness view. Like the extant views, the reason-responsiveness view vindicates the claim of epistemological continuity. But unlike the extant views, it does not share those problematic features. Further, I show that the reason-responsiveness view offers a way for champions of the claim of epistemological continuity to resist Avner Baz’s objection to the claim of epistemological continuity and his objection to the philosophical use of thought experiments while taking on board some attractive elements of his view.

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Who’s afraid of cognitive diversity?

Egler

2021

Inquiry

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The Challenge from Cognitive Diversity (CCD) states that demography-specific intuitions are unsuited to play evidential roles in philosophy. The CCD attracted much attention in recent years, in great part due to the launch of an international research effort to test for demographic variation in philosophical intuitions. In the wake of these international studies the CCD may prove revolutionary. For, if these studies uncover demographic differences in intuitions, then in line with the CCD there would be a good reason to challenge philosophical views that rely on those intuitions for evidential support. I argue that philosophical views that rely on demographyspecific intuitions for evidential support need not be threatened by such findings. I first provide a detailed analysis of the epistemological principles driving the CCD and distinguish three formulations of this challenge. I then show that there are good reasons to reject all such formulations of the CCD.

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No hope for the Irrelevance Claim

Cited by 4 publications

References 29 publications

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

Philosophical producers, philosophical consumers, and the metaphilosophical value of original texts

The epistemology of thought experiments without exceptionalist ingredients

Who’s afraid of cognitive diversity?

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